This video has it all:
The obvious question that this video raises is… what happened with the model? Most wind tunnel models end up getting scrapped – shredded and melted down to recycle the metal. but every now and then one escapes. The company keeps it for display, or in an archive, or sometimes an employee simply takes it home. Sometimes they end up on EBay.
Here’s another photo of the lifting body mockup I showed a month ago. Here you can see that the full display – apparently a USAF public relations item – included a more or less full length booster, presumably a Titan II. It’s not the best angle, but it *kinda* looks like this might be just the first stage of the Titan II (or a round tube resembling one) without a second stage. It’s doubtful that there was ever a plan to launch a one-man lifting body atop a single Titan II first stage; it would be distinctly suborbital, and without some deep throttling the acceleration would probably be pretty crushing.
When i last posted this, I mentioned that photos of this were shown “many times.” I wrote that because I remember seeing such photos… but once I started actually looking for them they turn out to be rather hard to find. I imagine I must’ve seen the photos in 1960’s magazines or such. Two more not terribly helpful photos are available HERE and
Boom Technology, a company working towards a supersonic passenger transport, is unveiling in Denver the mockup of their “XB-1,” a 1/3 scale technology demonstrator.
See the link above for some hugenormous photos, but here’s what the thing looks like:
To me the XB-1 looks like the Rose Mach Buster and a T-38 got a little drunk and made the plane with two backs, then slathered the baby with Bondo and sanded real, real smooth.
Boom Technology is working towards a commercial SST with a cruise speed of Mach 2.2, 44 passengers and transAtlantic range. They are hoping to reduce sonic boom to levels low enough that the FAA will let them fly overland, but as the law is currently written I don’t think they could legally do it if their plane was utterly silent. Getting the bureaucrats and politicians to change the regulations that stifle progress is probably a much bigger chore than designing a supersonic jet that’s actually commercially viable.
This YouTuber makes quad-drone and other flying RC Star Wars vehicles. In my opinion, it’s a toss-up whether his best is the Imperial Probe Droid or the Imperial Shuttle. I can see both being turned into successful commercial products. The probe droid needs a way to land other than being grabbed…
I’m looking for one of the Halcyon model kits of the Sulaco. I don’t need it to be mint-in-box, just complete and more or less intact. It can be had on ebay, but at very inflated prices. So if anyone has one they want to unload, let’s talk.
In the previous installment I worked out what I think the diameter of the individual modules is on the very large Lockheed Space station in this piece of art:
At the time I devoted my efforts to diameter and just kinda half-assed the module length. Now behold, in this latest installment of Don’t You Have Anything Better To Do Theater as I work out the module length with greater precision and less guesswork, using image processing programs (specifically Paint Shop Pro) and CAD programs (specifically Rhino 3D).
An early/mid 1960’s concept model of an interplanetary spacecraft using a nuclear fusion powerplant. Back then there was a LOT of faith in the idea of fusion reactors being just around the corner. One very obvious design flaw? No radiators. Any internal-fusion system (or internal-fission, for that matter) would need *vast* radiator surface area.
Details on the photo are unavailable. I originally downloaded this image from the GRIN (Great Images in NASA) website, which has now been closed in favor of a Flickr account that is difficult to search. Feh. If you want the full-rez version *another* Flickr account has it HERE.
A NASA-Langley film from decades ago, a collection of quick clips from wind tunnel tests. These show models designed to bend and flex somewhat like their larger real-world kin, and then they are massively overstressed to the point of failure. If doing a spit-take was a real thing rather than a Hollywood trope, I woulda spit-took at about 1:20, when a Boeing 2707-100 supersonic transport model is shown being turned into a damn porpoise in the wind tunnel (instead, I just blurted out “holy shee-it” and laughed for a while). About 15 seconds later it (or a model similar to it) is turned into so much confetti. I assume the wind tunnel had some sort of shrapnel-filter to keep the junk from being sucked into the blades…
This video shows the effort the National Air & Space Museum went to to restore the original USS Enterprise model. Damn if that doesn’t look like one hell of a job!
Tucked away inside the video were brief glimpses of some CAD diagrams of the Enterprise used for determining the paint scheme. I’d *love* to see these in full!
Bonham’s just wrapped up another one of their “no you can’t afford these” space history memorabilia auctions. Among the interesting stuff I looked at, sighed over and wished I lived in a world where somehow I was rich enough to afford, there was this item:
The other items listed all have their sales prices listed (like the $269,000 Sputnik model… yow), but this item seems to still only have it’s estimated price of $1500-$2500. My guess is that that means it didn’t sell. And if it didn’t, maybe it’s because it was advertised as being something far less interesting than it actually is. Consider: the description goes thus:
GEODETIC SATELLITE MODEL
Large scale model of a Geodetic Satellite. 37½ inch tall plexiglass pole topped with 16½ inch tall conical satellite with ten 21 inch long folding blue panels.
Employed by the United States Navy, the GeoSat was an Earth observation satellite launched in 1985. The goal of the GeoSat mission was to provide information on the marine gravity field.
Which, yeah, I guess that’s nice, but it’s not really one of the more exciting satellites out there. By the way, here is a geodetic satellite rendering:
And here is the model that was up for auction:
Are there similarities? Sure. But you know what that model *isn’t* a model of? A geodetic satellite. It’s a model of this:
Yup. That there is the business end of an SP-100 space nuclear reactor.
Now, I don’t know that the model is *really* anything special… the payload it’s attached to is dreadfully small and dull. It’s not like it’s attached to a neutral particle beam weapon or something similarly intriguing, and the SP-100 was hardly a classified program. But still a nuclear reactor powered spacecraft has *got* to be more interesting than a geodetic satellite, yes?
See also: